Els is a 62-year-old Belgian woman working in the banking sector. Looking to retire soon, a new pension reform changed her plans:

Instead of 104 active working days per year, employees now require 156 days to complete an “active” year. If you retire before having reached 44 full ‘active’ years, your pension is reduced by five percent per missing year.

Women's rights advocates worry about the retroactive application: women who made caring decisions decades ago will also face the new rules. When Els was a young mother in the 1990s, paid leave to care for children with special needs simply did not exist in Belgium, which is why she had to stop working for certain periods. Now she's left with three years where she does not meet the 156 days now required. The pension reform's retroactivity is probably going to be taken to court.

Els is just one of many women impacted by the changes. “The government depicts an uninterrupted full-time career as a free choice for everyone, but that is not the reality for many women today”, Heleen Struyven of women’s organisation Femma told The European Correspondent.

One example is the report published by the Belgian Planning Office, an independent economic forecasting body. It states that a Belgian woman’s pension is on average €459 lower than a man’s, which is 2.361 euros gross. Under the new rules, men’s pensions will decline by 2.3% on average, for women, it's 2.6%.

“We find it difficult to understand how the government could approve this despite clear evidence that women will be disproportionately affected”, Struyven told TEC. Some governing parties declared that the foreseen increase of the gap “is still within limits” and that they may tackle it in the next round of reforms. The party of the responsible Minister Jan Jambon is convinced the reform will push women to 'adapt' and work more, ultimately causing the gap to shrink.

Closing the gaps

Belgium certainly has some work to do. Its gender pension gap (GPG) (26.6%) is higher than the EU27 average (23.9%). Malta, Austria and Luxembourg “score” higher, at around 30%. Looking at the other end of the spectrum, Estonia has a spectacularly low 2.7% GPG.

“The main driver for the gender pension gap remains labour market inequality,” OECD pension expert Maciej Lis told us. “Women get lower pay for the same work, and fewer total career hours resulting from women taking on a higher share of informal caregiving.”

Consequently, countries where full-time employment is part of the culture typically have a lower GPG. Take Estonia, Czechia, Slovakia, and Lithuania: all former communist states with “a long tradition of active participation of women in the labour market”, Lis told us. Experts also point to the importance of high-quality childcare facilities. Belgium's severe shortage of these facilities is frequently cited as a major cause behind women's struggle to return to work.

“Countries use various tools to prevent labour market inequalities from affecting pension schemes”, Lis told us. The primary pension booster is care credits, which treat time taken off to care for children or sick relatives as formal working days. Even though these care credits are often gender-neutral by design, most are used by mothers, according to the OECD in a 2025 report.

Care credits are used in several countries across Europe. “But not all situations can be covered through these recognised periods”, Struyven told us. Caregivers usually receive a fixed amount lower than their normal income, “so many families cannot afford to use them,” she added.

So-called survivor pensions are another major scheme that can reduce the GPG by an average of one-third. Women, who tend to live longer, receive part of their partner's pension when he dies.

For Els, this kind of compensation arrived too late. “I get it, we all need to work longer. But the way the government wants to achieve that puts the burden on women, and that's just unfair,” Els told TEC.